Shawn Mendes: How a six-second video launched the next Justin Bieber

Thanks to one Vine clip, 16-year-old Canadian Shawn Mendes went from regular
schoolboy to pop music's hottest property overnight. The Telegraph
joins his entourage as he prepares for superstardom

'I realised that actually no one else was using Vine like that, so I thought, I’m going to take advantage of this and try to make something of it.’ Shawn Mendes, shot for the Telegraph Magazine, December 2014, in TorontoPhoto: Christopher Wahl

Shawn Mendes has nearly finished his 45-minute set at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto, tickets for which sold out in five minutes. There is a rustling among the 1,000-strong audience. Mendes looks up from his guitar, poised to play his song The Weight (5.8 million YouTube views at the time of writing) and sees the screaming sea of teenage girls before him is now one of hands holding brightly coloured paper hearts above their heads.

A crowd of a thousand is small to Shawn Mendes these days. He is almost universally billed as the next Justin Bieber (Canadian, precociously successful, handsome), but his musical output is more in keeping with his hero, Ed Sheeran (acoustic, earnest, writes his own infuriatingly catchy songs). In May Mendes, still only 16, will support Taylor Swift on 22 of the north American shows of her world arena tour. It is a big deal for Mendes but one can’t help but feel he is a savvy addition by Swift’s people, too.

I spent a day with Mendes, joining his (very modest) entourage as they headed from studio to studio recording interviews. Consequently, I have heard the story of his rise to fame multiple times. But I still can’t quite believe it happened exactly how he says.

Two and a half years ago Mendes was a student at Pine Ridge Secondary School in Pickering, Ontario. He played ice hockey and soccer and enjoyed longboarding (like skateboarding) with his friends. In June 2012 Vine, the six-and-a-half-second video-sharing service, was launched. In August he uploaded a clip of himself singing an acoustic version of Bieber’s As Long as You Love Me. When he logged on to his account the next morning, it had 10,000 likes and his follower count had gone through the roof. ‘That’s seriously how it happened,’ Mendes says. ‘I thought it was lagging [failing to load properly] or something. But I was freaking out a little bit at the time.’

Related Articles

Mendes now has 3.5 million followers on Vine, 2.4 million on Twitter and more than a million ‘likes’ on Facebook. He was signed to Island Records in June 2014. In July his four-track debut EP, The Shawn Mendes EP, reached number one on iTunes in 37 minutes. In August he turned 16. In October Time magazine included him in its list of the 25 most influential teens of 2014 (alongside the likes of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai).

‘I wasn’t doing it because I wanted anything to come of it,’ Mendes says of the Vine clip. ‘I was just doing it for fun. But then I realised that actually no one else was using Vine like that, so I thought, I’m going to take advantage of this and try to make something of it.’ He continued uploading clips to Vine and to the bigger YouTube channel as he watched his follower count soar, and he would ask his followers what they wanted him to sing. ‘We work as a team,’ he says. ‘When I grow, they grow.’ A month after that first Vine appearance, he performed his debut concert in Toronto for 600 people. Ticket-buying fans were pleased that his eight songs all went on slightly longer than six seconds… ‘I’d been playing guitar less than a year and wasn’t very good at it so it was super nerve-racking,’ he says. ‘The shirt I’m wearing tonight is the same one I wore that day.’

A video exclusive to the the Telegraph: Shawn Mendes reveals a video diary from his recent - and first - visit to London

Shawn Mendes was born in 1998 in Pickering to an English mother, Karen, and a father, Manuel, whose grandparents moved to Canada from Lagos, Portugal. Karen is an estate agent; Manuel is a businessman, selling bar and restaurant supplies in Toronto. ‘They’re involved with everything I do but my parents can’t sing or play instruments so it’s funny that I’m so interested in it,’ Mendes says. ‘Well, my mum thinks she can sing from time to time. They have been so intrigued by it all. They are both entrepreneurs, which is awesome, and now I am one too.’

Mendes’s parents have placed his career in the hands of his manager, Andrew Gertler, 26, who worked in the Warner Music Group’s ‘direct to customer’ division and who also manages the fledgling rapper Rockie Fresh under his own management company, AG Artists. He discovered a Mendes cover of A Great Big World’s Say Something online in November 2013 and quickly forwarded the link to Ziggy Chareton, Island Records’s head of A&R and a close friend. ‘I got a minute and 30 seconds into the song and I pressed pause,’ Chareton told Billboard last June. ‘I had to call him. I was like, “Are you out of your mind? This kid is a superstar!” Andrew was totally taken aback. He was like, “What do you mean?” And I said, “I think we need to move really quickly. His social presence is huge.”’ Gertler and Chareton promptly flew Mendes and his father to New York, and he signed a record deal with Island’s president, David Massey.

Mendes on the press trail. PHOTO: Christopher Wahl

Mendes still lives in Pickering with his parents and a younger sister, 11-year-old Aaliyah, who also has a Vine account – followed by more than 240,000 people. She sings too, but is not yet considering a career in music.

Given that his fame initially came through social media, it is fitting that Mendes taught himself to play guitar via YouTube only three years ago.

‘I would type in things like, “How to play beginner songs on guitar”, and one of the first I learnt was Hey, Soul Sister by Train,’ he recalls. ‘I taught myself these chords I didn’t know the name of and slowly started to get the hang. I was obsessed with it. Every day I’d play and think, I’m not good enough yet; I need to get better. Then I’d play for hours and hours.’ With no formal training beyond music lessons at school, he has been his own teacher since first picking up a guitar.

He claims not to be an obvious candidate for pop stardom, as he really wasn’t very good at singing.

‘I was terrible actually,’ he tells me. ‘I promise you, if you look at YouTube and see some of my first covers you will hear that I don’t sound good. But I was so obsessed with it and wanted so much to be good at it that I forced myself to figure out what sounds right and what sounds wrong. I’m not the best singer in the world; I’m just good at picking up what I want to sound like.’

He is right; he isn’t the best singer in the world. But he is a natural, charismatic performer. At one point in the show he asks for the house lights to be turned on and sings without a microphone – ‘So I can see their faces,’ he tells me later, ‘and see there are real people, that it’s not just a crowd.’ His sole accompaniment is a guitar, and when one over-excited fan lets out a scream she is quietened by the most ferocious group hush I have ever heard.

If any of this adoration is getting to Mendes, he is doing a sterling job pretending otherwise.

I accompany him to the studios of the television show ET Canada, where he records an interview. He is accompanied by Lowell, his security guard for the day, and Geoff Warburton, the 22-year-old brother of one of his best friends, Ian.

Before the interview he asks for an espresso because he is tired, and apologises to the make-up artist for the number of ‘pimples’ he has. ‘That’s the worst part of being 16,’ he tells me.

Mendes teaches a TV host how to pose for a good selfie. PHOTO: Christopher Wahl

Throughout the day's interviews he is asked a mixture of banal (‘Favourite word?’ ‘Favourite food?’) and esoteric (‘Where do you get this strong sense of yourself?’) questions. Favourite word: surreal. Least favourite: kerb. Sense of self: no idea. He loves muffins and really, really hates tomatoes. At the end of the ET Canada interview he reads off an autocue to promote his upcoming appearance at ET Canada’s New Year’s Eve celebration in Niagara Falls (‘Am I saying it wrong? Do you want me to say it differently?’) before heading to the headquarters of the Junos, Canada’s version of the Brit Awards. They want to record him walking up to a chalkboard and writing, ‘See you at the Junos!’ Self-conscious about his handwriting, he is not entirely comfortable with the idea but gives it a go. ‘Wait, let me practise my Ns; they’re terrible,’ he says. ‘This is what happens when you don’t go to school for six months.’ (Mendes is still enrolled at Pine Ridge but is completing the 11th grade online.) Eventually someone offers to write on the board for him. It can be edited later. ‘My fans are going to say, “Shawn, you did not write that,”’ he tells the cameraman, concerned.

Mendes singing Stay With Me by Sam Smith. The Vine has been looped nearly six million times.

Later I will watch Mendes pose with hundreds of girls at his pre-show meet and greet. Awkwardly tall at 6ft 2in (and still growing), he towers over his fans. He is in standard-issue teenage uniform of T-shirt, hoodie and beige chinos, and in the photos he looks like a clean-cut dream prom date. There are lots of hugs, lots of ‘love yous’ and lots of squealing. He is charming with each fan and exceptionally patient. Some look close to fainting, and one hugs Mendes so forcefully she nearly takes out the huge 'SHAWN MENDES' sign behind him. Many of the girls wear plaid shirts just like the one he will wear onstage later that night. (His friend Ian tells me the shirts have become Mendes’s signature look.)

Outside the concert hall I speak to some of the queuing fans. Raphaelle, 18, and Aurelie, 16, are sisters who drove 10 hours from Quebec to see him. ‘I skipped my English class to buy tickets,’ Raphaelle says. ‘Have you met him? Is he wearing the plaid shirt?’ she asks.

At the concert venue Mendes has five friends – bar Geoff, all from school – backstage with him. They come in handy as makeshift crowd control at the meet and greet, particularly as Mendes is yet to take on full-time security staff. ‘They think my life is crazy,’ Mendes says. ‘I think it’s crazy. It is crazy! They tease me all the time about my career. But I was always a bit of a showman.’

Mendes's six second version of Bill Withers's Ain't No Sunshine

In his dressing room before the show, I ask him about his relationship with his fans. Thanks to social media he is in a special position, in that he had an audience before he was found by anyone in the music industry. ‘It’s so important, the interaction between me and them,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I ask how they’re doing and they tell me stories. It’s cool. They know when it’s me [tweeting] or not.’ Occasionally, if there is a big announcement to make or Mendes isn’t entirely sure how to word something, someone from the label will tweet for him. The rest of the time it is him. When I got back to the hotel after spending the day with him, I looked at his Twitter page. Twenty minutes before, he had tweeted, ‘So sleepy’. It had already been retweeted 2,000 times. Mendes will, on average, tweet four times a day. An Instagram photo of him will usually receive more than 300,000 likes.

Mendes has over 2.4 million Twitter followers. PHOTO: Christopher Wahl

I wonder if Mendes is concerned about growing up too fast. Hundreds before him have certainly fallen foul of the pressures of premature celebrity. During our photo shoot, Mendes made easy conversation with the photographer about being in Portugal when the national football team lost on penalties to Spain during Euro 2012, about how he would never want to be worth as much as Cristiano Ronaldo, and his struggles with jetlag. ‘There's something about music that makes you grow up very quickly but the fact I’m around 25-year-olds like my manager and security guys more than most 16-year-olds makes a difference,’ he says. ‘I’m around adults I’ve known less than a year more than I am my parents and friends. I always think, what type of 11th grader would I be if I was still at school? Or if I was home all the time, would I be at the gym 24/7? Would I be as good at guitar? I know I wouldn’t be as mature as I am.’

What does he worry about? Longevity, it seems. ‘I don’t want to just be a teenage star,’ he says. ‘I want to be known by parents and I want them to go, “Oh I love that song; he’s really good for his age. My daughter loves him but I love him too.”’

'I wasn’t doing it because I wanted anything to come of it,’ Mendes says of his first Vine clip. ‘I was just doing it for fun.' PHOTO: Tim Donnell/Iota Creative

At least, I venture, you’re free of most common teenage troubles. He reminds me that he is trying to complete his high-school education online so still has homework angst, but I doubt he has the girl problems of his peers. ‘I worry about one day not being able to tell the difference of whether I’ve changed because I’m getting older and more mature or because of all of this,’ he says. ‘Success is absolutely nothing if you have no one to share it with. If you’re sitting in your mansion at the top of a mountain in LA by yourself, who cares what the view is? I worry about it getting too much and letting it consume me. But I don’t think I’d let that happen because I worry about it too much.’

Does he ever check the things he says with people around him, just to make sure? ‘Always,’ he says. ‘It’s the worst. I could never get a worse thing happen than if someone said to me, “Dude, that was a little cocky.”’ And if those around him don’t keep him in check, he can be sure that millions of teenage girls will.

Shawn Mendes’s new single, Something Big, will be released later this month